Should Your Online Shop Be a D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) Brand?
The Direct-to-Consumer strategy has become very popular in recent years. Should your business become a D2C brand? Learn more in our blog article.
The right to cancel is what many retailers are still struggling with. Despite harmonisation on the EU level 2 years ago, many UK retailers still do not correctly inform the consumer about their legal right to cancel. However, it is not at all difficult to do so, and we will tell you how you can easily be compliant.
Table of contents:
Drafting the cancellation policy
It may sound difficult, but the good news is: It’s not. The Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 (CCRs) provide a legal model instruction for cancellation. If you use that one properly, you can fulfil the relevant information obligation for the right to cancel. Using the model instruction will help you to make sure that no mandatory information is missing.
The return cost, for example, may be imposed on the consumer but only if the consumer was informed about this in the cancellation policy before they ordered the goods. When going through the model instruction and putting together the parts that suit your shop, you can make sure that you inform them correctly so that you can pursue your own rights.
How to provide the information
There is much pre-contractual information that needs to be given to consumers. The right to cancel is one of them. It needs to be provided on the website, but also on a durable medium.
A durable medium is defined as "paper or email, or any other medium that allows information to be addressed personally to the recipient, enables the recipient to store the information in a way accessible for future reference for a period that is long enough for the purposes of the information, and allows the unchanged reproduction of the information stored."
Practically, this means emails, faxes, and letters. In the eco-friendly paper-free world, this will usually be an email.
When to provide the information
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The consumer must be able to read and acknowledge their cancellation rights before he submits the order. Therefore, the best option is to include the adapted instructions for cancellations provided by the CCRs in your general terms and conditions or as a permanently available link in the footer. It will be an add-on and a very user-friendly option if you include a link to the full cancellation policy on the ordering page. In cases where no legal right to cancel exists, this will make it really clear to the consumer.
